Bridge of Clay Quotes

“There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that's if they're spoken at all.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“There were reasons to leave, and reasons to stay, and all of it was the same.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“We skip the moments like stones.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“A murderer should probably do many things, but he should never, under any circumstances, come home.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“She laughed and he felt her breath, and he thought about that warmness, how people were warm like that, from inside to out; how it could hit you and disappear, then back again, and nothing was ever permanent--”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“It was a Sunday, an arsonist sunrise.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“I loved you already then.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are:

A family of ramshackle tragedy.

A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He’d told them what Saturday night meant. The mattress, the plastic sheet. He told them of Matador in the fifth. He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay melted, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. ‘The night before she fell,’ he said, ‘we met there, we were naked there, and –’ He stopped because Catherine Novac – in a shift of gingerblondness – had stood and she’d walked towards him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt. She said, ‘You came to us, you came, you came.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“As if sensing the oncoming theatre, the pigeons arrived from nowhere, and dug in close on the powerlines. They were perched on TV aerials, and, God forbid, on the trees. There was also a single crow, fat-feathered and plump, like a pigeon disguised in a trench coat.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Me, I'm known for bruises and levelheadedness, for height and muscle and blasphemy, and the occasional sentimentality.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“There was rain like a ghost you could walk through. Almost dry when it hit the ground.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“When you wait you start feeling deserved.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“All that remained was to get to camp, learn English better, find a job and a place to live. Then, most importantly, buy a bookshelf. And a piano.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He was a wasteland in a suit; he was bent-postured, he was broken.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He was a great horse,” she went on, “and the perfect story—we wouldn’t love him so much if he’d lived.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“...somewhere in his murkiest depths, he wasn't so much afraid of being left again as condemning someone else to second best.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He was caught somewhere, in the current--of destroying everything he had, to become all he needed to be”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Returning and being let in: Two very different things.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Writing is always difficult, but easier with something to say.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“There was guilt for enjoying anything. Especially the joy of forgetting.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn’t know it.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Each boy stood, slouched yet stiff, hands in pockets. If the dog had pockets, she'd have had her paws in them, too, for sure.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“He loved her more than Michelangelo.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“We admit to almost everything, and the almost is all that counts.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off. She looked just like a Dunbar boy. With that haircut she was one of us.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts. We were born for relics like these.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“There was a kind of generosity to her, of heat and sweat and life.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Around six-thirty, Rory was across the street, leaning against a telegraph pole, smiling just for laughs; the world was filthy, and so was he. After a short search, he pulled a long strand of girls' hair from his mouth. Whoever she was, she was out there somewhere, she lay open-legged in Rory's head. A girl we'll never know, or see.”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

“Those kids, they would've loved this place, they would've walked and skipped and danced here, all legs and sunny hair. They'd have cartwheeled the lawn, shouting, "And don't go lookin' at our knickers, right?”
― Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay